Availability Management focuses on meeting or exceeding in a cost-effective manner the agreed service level requirements for the level of availability provided for all vCloud service offerings. Managing availability in a vCloud environment depends on VMware vCloud Director component availability as well as the resilience of the underlying infrastructure. VCD works transparently with VMware vCenter Server to provision and deploy virtual machines on hosts. Therefore, it is imperative to architect redundancy and protect the infrastructure components. Provisioned virtual machines can be protected by VMware vSphere High Availability (HA). Virtual machines can also be protected by backup tools in the guest OS or vStorage API.